Sunday 2 November 2014

Ebola and the spoilt brat

           
          This incredibly self centred nurse who's amazing hubris allows her to speak as an authority on Ebola, which she certainly is not, is illustrative of the extraordinary attitude that everyone's opinion carries equal weight.  She has the unmitigated gall and brazen effrontery to challenge the most knowledgeable experts and to pretend that she knows the unknowable and is prepared to take the small risk that she could unleash an epidemic.   She is doing this because she felt that she was not treated with sufficient deference, felt unappreciated and demeaned by the poor facilities that were available to her by the stumbling, fumbling workers and policy makers who were doing  their best to try and avoid spread, knowing full well where the  blame would be placed should things go wrong,  She was more interested in challenging the protocols that though unpopular and inconvenient, may prove to be the safest thing to do.  Encouragement by jounalists and lawyers likely played some part. She is a poor example of a health care professional and it is likely that her behaviour will influence other health care workers to put their personal comfort ahead of the welfare of the public.
          No doubt the book will be appearing soon.

2 comments:

  1. The failure to voluntarily sequester oneself is a completely narcissistic failure in anotherwise commendable endeavor...

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  2. It takes a health care provider much more hubris than good clinical sense to declare that ebola represented no threat to the American public. In terms of being dedicated targets of study, the hemorrhagic fevers really were only curiosities not in need of solutions as they occurred in oil-less places. Volunteers who don't willingly sequester themselves after volunteering in hot zones are truly selfish and seemingly presumptive of their comprehensive knowledge when there is none. We in medicine failed by not encouraging quarantine and limiting flights while tracking contacts, as that is the sine qua non of limiting the spread of infectious disease that has no cure. We had no trouble banning UK's beef when Jakob Creutzfeldt was the scare of the month, nor did America have any trouble in banning ours. Our concern about the optics of "turning our back on Africa," could (and may yet) hurt a lot of people.

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